[Friday Map] Give your players the shaft with… “The Circle of Doom”

I keep wanting to post this map and then don’t do it because I want to stock it first. But I never actually get around to stocking it. I’ve USED it three times now in my games, but always stocking it “on the fly” using random stocking from the various rules we were playing with at the time. Thus, to celebrate Canada Day, I’m finally going to post it here and see if anyone else can do a decent job of turning this map into the awesome it deserves to be.

The map itself is centred around a massive shaft some 70 feet across spanned by four bridges on four different levels. I’ve run it as a rapid delve through four dungeon levels using level-appropriate encounters at each level (appropriate to the dungeon level, not the character level). In other words, it quickly goes from a team of halflings at the beginning to 8 hungry trolls guarding the exit.

The Circle of Doom

The map itself was drawn in a single draft with a regular HB (#2) pencil on plain white paper with a grid on a background sheet, then scanned and contrast-enhanced. It is one of my favourites and I can’t believe I’m only posting it now, well over a year after drawing it.

Very cool indeed. Lightly colour coding each level would be a huge visualization aid though… What (if anything) was the inspiration and/or backstory for this complex? Repeatedly criss-crossing that pit is an odd and needlessly dangerous design choice for the theoretical builders to commit to unless it was forced upon them by something or someone. Why they did this could be the most interesting part of this map. They could have just tunnelled circular paths around the pit, but, no… they had to cross it – four times. Why? :-)

I notice, purpose wise, that there is a perfectly circular, very deep pit, and the walkways form a multi-dimensional Chaos Cross. This could have been a summoning location for the demon armies to call forth hoards of flying demons to bulk out their armies. At least, that was the plan, before something very unfortunate happened to them. Perhaps now a holy order occupies it. Or it is a museum dedicated to the artifacts of long-dead and defeated cults of the Good God. Or it was lost but cultists have found it and are now trying to trigger its gate-hood.

Using this in Warhammer, you could have a level for each of the Chaos gods. This could be built in the mountains, trying to create a peninsula of the Chaos Wastes from which to launch sorties. Why didn’t it work? Why indeed?

Another possibility more aligned with the wonder and awe of B/X that is far less sinister is art. Maybe this is in a glacier, and the natural layers of ice with their interplay of density and light and texture were elaborated into fantastic friezes (pardon the pun) or other artistic endeavors, and the four walkways were designed as viewing galleries for the magnificence. Perhaps they are penance paid by an ice giant who ravaged a kingdom, made this art for apology, and spent the rest of his days at the bottom of the shaft–immortal? Chained? Perhaps an artist colony and a temple to a winter god compete for the space, each trying to oubid the other in hiring dwarven contractors to make ever more elaborate living spaces for them.

Running with the Chaos gods idea, you could have five levels above, so that levels 6 to 9 are the Chaos gods, with each god getting the floor corresponding to its preferred number. But that might be going too far… :-)

Hi, this is a gorgeous map to watch indeed, I wonder, how do you portrait it to your players? I mean do you draw it on a mat as the players go, or do you describe it and the players map it on graph paper.

Depends on the group. Some groups I draw the map as we go (not on the mat, we don’t use a battle mat or anything like that, just plain old graph paper), and most groups I just describe it and they map it.

I actually specifically needed THIS EXACT DUNGEON for my game after the session last night. My group is exploring Dreaded Island (click here for information in it, it is wonderful http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=47591 ) and I am mixing in many things from the old classic Isle of Dread. Well, to get to the top of the plateau, I didn’t want the hanging bridge (they’ve already encountered something like that so I needed a dungeon with a method of elevation.

Half way up the cliff side they will see the opening leading inside. This is what they will find inside to get them to the top (to the plateau where sits the ancient temple of the Cyclops God where they hopefully will find the “Cyclops Eye”, a golden pearl of mysterious power). Freakin’ awesome.

A question Mr Dyson: I started in stocking it and was trying to figure out how to split up the levels. I noticed that on the west side there’s a curving passage that with stairs going up. Seems like these should go down? Or is it more crazy than I think?

The Harkayli people are wanderers, traveling between the material realm, the realm of Dream, and possibly other places at the decree of their patron god, the Weaver. Always they arrive and build settlements in secluded locations before tentatively establishing trade with any neighbors they can find; and always they disappear again, years or centuries later, leaving behind strongholds of surprising complexity.

The Harkayli lived on the slope of that mountain, right over there… so long ago that their memory is nothing more than a story told to the current generation’s grandparents when they were children, but their fortifications remain. And the Well remains. It’s too dangerous to visit, usually – the Harkayli never settle in places too convenient or close to civilization, and the site is periodically sacked and occupied by adventurers, bandits, and monsters – but the interior is beautiful to behold.

Nearly twenty fathoms below ground, deeper even than the Harkayli’s secret refuge of traps, fortifications and warehouses, the Well is domed with a luminescent image of stars drawn from no known sky. As one descends through the Well, each room is decorated with the script and imagery of one of the Harkayli’s sacred tiik poems upon which the visitor is intended to stop and meditate. And each crossing of one of the bridges spanning the Well is intended to deepen the introspection of the visitor. If one looks upward, the higher bridges seem translucent and allow the stars of the dome to shine through; if one looks down, the lower bridges seem to spin, so that the darkness of the Well’s depths represents the primal churning of Chaos.

It is said that performing the proper rituals allows the Well to be used for its true purpose: the illusory Chaos can be made into a real gateway to other worlds. It’s a shame, a true shame, that this testament to the Harkayli’s arts has become the home of monsters, the bastion of outlaws, and the playpen of bloodthirsty sell-swords, but that’s the way of the world.